100 embarrassed at her own fury, and also because she felt that Lltde Thomas's de- mons tortured !um enough. She asked whether I remembered the silhouettes I did remember them, vaguely, though I had to be reminded that they'd once hung on a satin ribbon in Etta Sue's living room. I remembered them from later on, when they'd hung below the light above the bed in my mother's bedroom, attached to the same ribbon. There had also been one of Lilly, as a baby, and another ofPunkin Puppy, in separate frames The three framed silhouettes on the ribbon had been of Thomas, Sr., Etta Sue, and the man who, Etta Sue told my mother, had cut the silhouettes. Etta Sue explained this somewhat humorous fact by saying that the silhouette cutter was going to throw his self-portrait away-he probably did them the way secretaries practice their typing, or something-and that she had rescued it from the trash. Litde Thomas had destroyed his silhouette before it got into the frame, and though Etta Sue al- ways meant to have another one cut, Litde Thomas wouldn't sit still a second time. My mother shook her head. She said that she supposed the silhouette cutter's self-portrait was sort of like Alfred Hitchcock's including himself in his own films, though that wasn't a good comparison, because Etta Sue had hung it up, not the man himself When Etta Sue was forced to move out of her house and into the Twentieth Street apartment after Thomas, Sr.,'s death, she had to discard many things The furniture my mother could under- stand, but parting with so many personal possessions had seemed to her a mistake. When the ribbon with the framed sil- houettes went into the trash, my mother grabbed it out and said she would keep it for Etta Sue until she felt better. And Etta Sue had given her the strangest look. First shocked, then sad, my mother thought. And in all the years my mother had the silhouettes hung in her bedroom, Etta Sue never mentioned them, although she did eventually ask for Thomas, Sr.,'s shaving mug back, and for the framed picture of herself and her husband taken at a ChInese restaurant on their first ",\" :?":"(; " 1S: .. c: .s. :t..:t :t.::- . : . \="':-:t , ';.\c/ f ::: * X r.5 \, . annIversary. But the point of the story, my mother said, was this: One weekend a few months after Thomas, Sr.,'s death, she was taking care of Little Thomas and Lilly, and Litde Thomas had gone into the bedroom while all the rest of us were in the back yard and he had taken the silhouettes out of the frames and cut the noses off Then he slipped them all back into their frames and rehung them. It was days before my mother noticed- everyone with his or her nose chopped o plus Punkin Puppy, earless. She hurried right over to Little Thomas's school and waited for him to get out. He walked home, but that day he didn't go anywhere before she con- fronted him. By her own account, she grabbed the tip of his nose and squeezed it, asking him how he thought he'd like being without his nose Then she grabbed his ears and asked him if he thought he might like to spend the rest of his life not hearing, too. She crouched and made him look her in the eye and tell her why he'd done it. It was amazing that someone didn't notice her making such a scene and come over, she said. Litde Thomas gasped when she pulled him around and shook him by his shoul- ders, but he never crIed. He had done it, he told her, because the faces in the frames were miniature black ghosts, there to haunt people. He disfigured them because they were ghost monsters with special powers of sneaking inside people. If he got rid of the black ghosts, cut them up a little, they would become white ghosts, with no special power. My mother was so horrified she couldn't stand. He had given a quite specific, terribly upsetting answer, and she had no idea what response to make, because if he really thought those thIngs he was mad. That would make it the first incidence of real madness in the family. She was ninety- Le-r per-cent sure he was tell- ing her what he really believed, but she also thought there was some small chance he might be having her on. She stayed there quite a while, weak in the knees, staring into his face, looking for more information. "You think 1'd care if I didn't have a nose?" he said. "[wouldn't care if I didn't have a nose or a mouth or eyes. I wish the spenn had never gone into the egg. I ) ;:.::: < YI{ ,. :o::,;,..: .*} J .. x: wouldn't mind if there was no me, and ld ' . h " you wou n t, elt ere My mother remembered being sur- prised that he knew about sex-that he kn h d " " d " " ew suc wor s as spenn an egg. She didn't remember what she said to him next, but it had something to do with how she understood that he was very upset that his father was dead and had disappeared, but that he mustn't confuse that with thinking. Litde Thomas broke away from her. "You stupid fool," he said. She re- membered that distinctly: "You stupid fool." After Litde Thomas's father's death, my mother now suddenly reminded me, someone courted Etta Sue for a bit, but eventually faded away. In retrospect, my mother said, she thought it might quite possibly have been ("Now, don't laugh," she said) the milkman. Because, come to think of it, why else-unless she was a little embarrassed-would Etta Sue refuse to let anyone in the family know whom she was seeing? Also, Nat the Milkman had been a Sunday painter, so perhaps he had also cut silhouettes. "Say nothing of this to Zalla," my mother saId. It was somethIng she had begun to say increasingly, as an after- thought, in recent years-or perhaps as an end to each of her stones, not as an afterthought, really. I kissed her cheek and gave her hand a squeeze, turning off her bedside lamp with my free hand. It was early evening and dark. We were in autumn, the sea- son when Thomas, Sr., had slipped from high atop the mounded hay-slipped in slow motion, compared to the way his Cousin Pete had been struck by lightning. That was the past. I imagined the fu- ture: the graffiti figures that had already disappeared in the downstairs hallway, whited out by a paint roller. Then I thought about the hospital in Belize, to which for all intents and purposes that paint roller could travel like a comet, to whiten the drywall that had at long last been installed in the corridors of the new hospital. Zalla would be standing there, her starched white nurse's unifonn con- trasting with her dark skin, and in a blink my mother would be dead, quite unexpectedly-gone from her white- sheeted bed to the darkness, as Zalla paused in her busy day to remember us, a nice Amencan family. .